With an eclectic mix of science and art, inaugural MAX festival looks to outer space

From the early days of the Apollo program through the heyday of the space shuttle, the people leaving our planet for exploration have tended to be scientists and aviators. And sure, that makes a certain amount of intuitive sense.

But what about the artists? Doesn’t it seem likely that poets and painters, dancers and musicians and performers might have something worthwhile to say about humanity’s place in the cosmos, floating on this little blue marble in a vast black void?

That loaded rhetorical question, or at any rate something like it, underlies a dazzlingly eclectic new festival that’s about to unfold over three days across three San Francisco venues just in time for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Presented by MAX (Media Art Xploration), an organization dedicated to cultivating the border region between science and the arts, MAX 2019: A Space Festival — and yes, the Kubrick echo is deliberate — promises a smorgasbord of interdisciplinary offerings.

Just scanning the lineup of events at the Exploratorium, the California Academy of Sciences and Z Space is enough to induce a giddy feeling of weightlessness. There will be space-themed performances by the Kronos Quartet and Ethan Lipton and his Orchestra. “Spacewoman of the Underground” involves performance artist Christine Zuercher’s attempt to dig a hole through the Earth in a homemade space suit, while “Extraterrestrial: A Drag Invasion” promises, among other things, “comic creations and supernatural lip-syncs.”

The schedule includes a host of educational events about the personal realities of space travel. There’s a poetry slam. There’s a visual installation based on astronomical traditions of the Lakota. And there are human-machine collaborations – one created by engineer Xin Liu and poet Abigail Wender, another by roboticist Alexander Reben and dancer-choreographer Alice Sheppard.

The multiplicity of this approach was a deliberate choice, according to producing director Kay Matschullat.

“It’s important to us that we get as many different kinds of people in on this as possible,” she says. “The whole thing about space science is that we’re all under one sky. When we do space travel and look back at the Earth, there’s a change of perspective that makes it clear that we’re earthlings first.

“We wanted to give the audience that feeling, even if only for a moment – of identifying not nationally but globally. And you can’t get that perspective by just talking to one kind of person.”

The germ of the festival, Matschullat says, grew out of an interdisciplinary project she was working on at Harvard, where she teaches. It was a performance piece about the 1969 moon landing, and it involved a cadre of engineers and theater artists.

“The engineers were amazed at how afraid the theater artists were at the idea of introducing technology into the performance – whereas the artists all felt there was room for much more humanistic thought in the tech world.

“It seemed clear to me that the scientists and artists are all seekers, looking for a better world and more responsible technology. So we wanted to try to get them together, engaging an audience with these innovations, and move from a place of fear to a place of imagining new possibilities.”

Christine Zuercher in “Spacewoman of the Underground.” Photo: Christine Zuercher

“Pas de Deux,” the collaboration between Reben and Sheppard, promises to be an example of such possibilities – an exploration of the interaction between human consciousness and the preprogrammed algorithms of a robot. As Sheppard dances, Reben’s software takes her movements as input and translates them into motions of a mechanical arm loaded with a pen or paintbrush – transmuting the evanescent movements of dance, in other words, into a permanent and tangible counterpart.

For Reben, the project is a continuation of such projects as a robotic documentary filmmaker, a Wall-E-like device that rolls around interviewing human subjects and recording their responses to probing questions.

“A lot of my work deals with the human-machine symbiosis,” says Reben. “In general I prefer to put things out there without a definitive answer, just asking, ‘What do you think?’ ”

If “Pas de Deux” still partakes of the traditional theatrical divide – with performers on one side of the notional footlights and audience members on the other – “Heisenberg,” an immersive augmented-reality game designed by the artist Janani Balasubramanian, is something else again. Premiered in 2017 at the High Line in New York City, it’s an activity for any large number of participants in a public (preferably outdoor) space.

Each player is fitted out with headphones that instruct them where to go and how to interact with others – but not all the instructions are the same, and the outcome of these interactions can be sublimely unpredictable. The result, Balasubramanian says, is a flexible metaphor for a number of scientific and psychological phenomena.

On an astrophysical level, the beginning of the piece models the Big Bang. “Everyone starts at the same time, then diverges into different roles – some are hydrogen, some helium and so forth,” says Balasubramanian. “One of my favorite moments is when the group joins to mourn the passing of a supernova, which becomes a black hole, and there’s a dirge-like version of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,’ with everyone singing along.”

At the same time, “Heisenberg” explores the innate human desire to see others as being motivated by the same forces that motivate us – a desire that is cannily thwarted by the different tracks playing into everyone’s headsets.

“I was working on this piece in the wake of the 2016 election,” Balasubramanian says, “and I was enthralled by how many people could not understand how someone else’s reality could be so different that they would vote for Trump. And that in turn goes back to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and the fundamental limits to how well we can understand one another.”

With its deliberate blend of science and art – a blend that Balasubramanian says owes a large creative debt to Italo Calvino’s 1965 story collection “Cosmicomics” – “Heisenberg” may well stand as a concise emblem of the festival’s overall goal.

“I work a lot with scientists, but I like to create games that have things like narrative and drama and poetry embedded in them. It’s a form that allows people to understand the beauty and really the content of the science, without having to go through the math.”